AOL email question

[Lcarvone]

A relative of one of my co-workers has an AOL account that he uses for all of his personal and many business communications. One of his exchange students from last year was given a user account as well and it contains a bunch of emails that my neighbor now needs for him. We backed up the Organize folder in AOL right after Christmas when the student left so I have that on disk. It is my understanding that I can simply rename his current Organize folder to something else and copy over the Organize folder backup to the same place. This would in effect show his emails from that time around Christmas. Once they are printed out I can then delete the old Organize folder and restore the one that was temporarily renamed. First off I am correct in this based on anyone's experience?

Secondly it would be much easier to do it from home instead of driving all he way over to his house. So if I installed AOL on one of my PC's and had his login info then I could follow the same procedure and have all of the emails here to print out. I like this idea better because I can do it when I have the time and this would lessen if not remove the possibility of screwing up his AOL account installation on his PC (I admittedly never had or dealt with AOL software before).

My fear is if I log in here at home that somehow I would screw up his account on his computer???

Any and all thoughts are appreciated

 

[QuixoticOne]

Admittedly I've never used AOL so I don't really 'get' what you mean about the folders. Perhaps you're on the right track.

I will add, however, that I just set up access to a relative's AOL email account. Instead of installing any AOL software whatever I just installed the Mozilla Thunderbird email client program which is quite standard, essentially an alternative to Microsoft Outlook / Express.

AOL fortunately and laudably supports IMAP access protocol for email which gives you very simple access to all the mails and folders stored for that account on the AOL system, and what is better, by default it will not 'delete' any of those messages when they're retrieved by the IMAP mail client software like Thunderbird. It is designed to allow you to read / access the same set of emails in your account from multiple different PCs with the messages being preserved on the central server.

Perhaps this would be a simple way to get access to those mail folders from an alternative PC (assuming they're on the AOL server still) without disrupting his primary email program / setup.

http://about.aol.com/faq/openmailaccess

 

[imported_Kiwi]

This seems to be a thread close to what I have in mind. I've never used AOL for mail, and this reply makes it seem that you don't normally "keep" copies of anything on your own system. I haven't even been able to find a local copy of a bookmarks file. My daughter in law uses AOL's browser and eMail system, and I just upgraded her hardware for her. She was fretting about her own user files, and I've backed up everything else.

Personally, I started out with MOSAIC, used Netscape before AOL bought it, Mozilla after that, and either Sea Monkey or FireFox now. There really doesn't seem to be very much congruency!